Montreal from A to Z: Q is for quiz night

Amy Luft asks the questions at Quiz Night at Grumpy’s in Montreal on Sunday, June 15, 2014.Dave Sidaway
/ The Gazette

From left to right, Molly Ann Rothschild, André Kirchhoff, William Dolan and Monique Muise look over their answers during Quiz Night at Grumpy’s in Montreal on Sunday, June 15, 2014.Dave Sidaway
/ The Gazette

MONTREAL — I’m pretty sure there are three major-league baseball teams named after birds.

Orioles, Blue Jays and Cardinals ... right? Is there a fourth?

Any other night, I’d just pull out my smartphone and a few swipes later, I’d have my answer. But this is quiz night, so my brain and the brains of my three teammates will have to suffice. This might have been easier before the beer started flowing.

“I’m just going to write them all out,” declares André Kirchhoff, a man who wins far more than he loses at this game. He starts scribbling.

We’re seated in Grumpy’s, a Montreal institution tucked into the basement of a building on Bishop St. The ceiling in what was once Mordecai Richler’s watering hole is low enough to remind you that you’re partially underground. The floor is scuffed with the wear of a thousand shoes on a thousand feet — dancing, shifting, trudging up to the bar and then back to the table, and then up to the bar again. The bathroom is ... functional.

“Again, I’m looking for the number of baseball teams, not the team names!” booms a voice from the front of the room. It belongs to quizmaster Amy Luft. The native Montrealer has been hosting this event every Sunday since early 2009, and she takes it just as seriously as her day job with CTV Montreal.

“I’ve seen trivia hosts come and go,” says bartender Gern Vlchek, who has been pouring drinks at Grumpy’s for over a decade. “Amy is not a good trivia host, she’s the best trivia host. She’s always prepared.”

According to Vlchek, there’s a core of regulars that show up every week to answer Luft’s carefully crafted questions. The other half of the crowd is ever-changing.

“You get the people you know and love, but also new people who are, frankly, the challengers trying to unseat this crazy bunch of regulars,” he says.

While the regulars know the rules, Luft always makes sure to spell them out for the fresh faces. No Internet-enabled devices, no more than four on a team, and please, no yelling out the answers. Each round, including the music round, is carefully built around a theme and given a catchy title (“It ain’t easy being green” and “The bigger the better” are recent examples). The team with the most points each round wins free booze.

“Every week I try to have clever categories and I want to keep it fresh and fun,” Luft tells me as she steps off the stage for a quick break and a top-up on her whiskey. “After five years, that gets trickier and trickier. Even this week, I went through three or four categories before I found one that stuck and I wanted to use. It’s really important to me that someone can walk into this bar and not feel dumb. It’s a night that should challenge your intellect, but everyone should feel comfortable.”

Quiz nights are popular in cities all over the globe, of course, but they often cater to a specific group. Sometimes it’s history buffs or sports fans, other times it’s sci-fi aficionados or even students. But Grumpy’s quiz night caters to just about everyone looking for a fun evening out, and in that sense, Luft notes, it’s quintessentially Montreal — a mixed bag that’s “a little bit edgy, a little risqué sometimes.”

“Normally I always ask two or three Montreal-specific questions,” she adds. “I do think it’s important to know our own local history, and our local politics and personalities.”

While Luft begins tallying the points for the round we just finished, I saunter back to my perch near the bar. My teammates have handed in our sheet and are now chatting happily. We’re supposed to wait for Amy to confirm the answers, but who can wait now that we have access to our phones for a few minutes?

Seconds after I sit down, someone looks up from a glowing screen and proudly announces the number of major-league baseball teams named after birds. It’s three.

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